We believe in decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless, IMMUTABLE blockchains. We believe in the original vision of Ethereum as a world computer you can't shut down, running irreversible smart contracts. We believe in a strong separation of concerns, where system forks are only possible in order to correct actual platform bugs, not to bail out failed contracts and special interests. We believe in censorship-resistant platform that can be actually trusted - by anyone. Code is law.

Ethereum Foundation responded to DAO debacle in the worst way possible. Special interests controlling the Foundation are ramming through DAO bailout hardfork against principled opposition of a significant economic minority of Ethereum stakeholders. According to (diligently hidden, pro-fork) coin vote on Carbonvote, 19% of ETH holders oppose this hardfork. Also, about 22% of Ethereum miners voted against the previous 'DAO softfork' and would logically oppose hardfork as well. Such a significant minority of stakeholders should not be silenced or intimidated into submission - they should be given a clear choice.

If we want to continue to move forward and guarantee survival of the original Ethereum vision, we must fork Ethereum. This will lay the foundation to build secure decentralized applications that are actually censorship resistant.

The main goal of the project is to ensure survival of the original Ethereum blockchain. We will strive to provide alternative for people who strongly disagree with DAO bailout and the direction Ethereum Foundation is taking their project. Anyone opting to remain on the original chain should have such opportunity.

Development

We fork Ethereum and maintain upstream patches similar to the relation between Redhat and CentOS, until a community can form around the project and create a road map. Until this happens we can fork multiple existing clients to help prevent a monoculture of clients. We plan to follow https://github.com/ethereum development except for any features they introduce into existing clients that violate the key principles of openness, neutrality and immutability.

Please help us spread the word about this project in Ethereum community!

Volunteers

If you feel strongly about the cause, please get involved. With just days before the planned hardfork, we need your support to ensure original Ethereum survival. We need more developers, website designers, people who can write and advocate the need for Ethereum Classic. Please let us know what are your skills and how you would like to contribute. Redditors, please reply here. Github users, please open new issue.

Users

In order to remain on the original Ethereum chain, just don't upgrade to hardfork client version pushed by Ethereum Foundation. We will maintain non-fork versions of all major Ethereum clients (as well as other key software), so going forwards all the improvements will be available to you.

Fun fact. If you keep ETH under your direct control (not in a 3rd party wallet or exchange account), you will have two sets of coins instead of one post-fork. You could then install a forked Ethereum client in addition to Ethereum Classic, copy your private keys there and use your coins on both chains! You won't be so lucky if your ETH are locked with 3rd party going into the fork - some exchanges already announced that they will only return one type of coin post-fork to its users.

Miners

Miners supporting the original chain should just keep mining with current version of software for now, without upgrading to client version introducing the hardfork code. It will be always possible to download and build latest non-fork version from https://github.com/ethereumclassic.

The difficulty of the original chain will be quite high post-fork, but it will adjust to actual hashrate shortly (just 2048 blocks, a few hours). Since it is expected that most hashrate will move to hardfoked chain, post-adjustment it will be possible to obtain decent mining rewards in classic ethers even with solo mining.

Because the difficulty adjusts quickly, it will be also quite possible to solo mine soon after the fork. If you intend to mine Ethereum Classic, please don't upgrade to geth 1.4.10 just yet, due to potential vulnerability. We will inform you when it's safe to upgrade. For now, just solo-mine with geth 1.4.9 or any earlier version, or use Classic pool.

Most important question for traders is 'will ETHC have market price'? There are all reasons to believe that it will. Essentially, ETHC is an Ethereum 'spinoff coin' with a wide user base of all current ETH users. Some of them will see the value of transacting on a censorship-resistant chain, some won't. This creates interesting arbitrage opportunities for smart traders. Additional reasoning why EHTC is very unlikely to be 'worthless'.

Both Poloniex and Bitfinex announced that they will assign their users both ETH and ETHC after the fork. This is a step in the right direction, now it's up to these major exchanges to enable ETH/ETHC trading that will no doubt be demanded by users. Decentralized exchange Bitsquare announced ETHC trading right after the fork. Other trading venues will follow since there is a strong business case. We are in touch with several other exchanges to add ETHC trading to their platforms. If your exchange is interested in ETHC trading, please contact us.

Is it safe to mine to bittrex eth adress?As there is no ETH Classic Wallet available anywhere or am I wrong?

From OP

"Both Poloniex a Bitfinex announced that they will assign their users both ETH and ETHC after the fork. This is a step in the right direction, now it's up to these major exchanges to enable ETH/ETHC trading that will no doubt be demanded by users. Decentralized exchange Bitsquare announced ETHC trading right after the fork. Other trading venues will follow since there is a strong business case. We are in touch with several other exchanges to add ETHC trading to their platforms. If your exchange is interested in ETHC trading, please contact us."

The lesson to be learned from this event is that we need to minimize the points of centralisation in every blockchain.I am not against hard forks if the decision is achieved in a pure democratic way. Ask yourself whether the ethereum hardfork was done in this way or not and based on that answer choose your chain.

I feel like it wasn't, but I was an outsider looking in, waiting to see the results. My business partner has a few BTC tied in ETH so I've been monitoring the situation for him. I have mixed feelings about the hard fork itself, but from what I've been reading it was not achieved in much of a democratic way.

The lesson to be learned from this event is that we need to minimize the points of centralisation in every blockchain.I am not against hard forks if the decision is achieved in a pure democratic way. Ask yourself whether the ethereum hardfork was done in this way or not and choose your chain based on the answer.

Coinbase (regulated bank) enjoying the hard fork is a huge red flag while other exchanges were angry. Once gambling, etc get popular vitalik will be held in contempt until he forks again.

Is it safe to mine to bittrex eth adress?As there is no ETH Classic Wallet available anywhere or am I wrong?

From OP

"Both Poloniex a Bitfinex announced that they will assign their users both ETH and ETHC after the fork. This is a step in the right direction, now it's up to these major exchanges to enable ETH/ETHC trading that will no doubt be demanded by users. Decentralized exchange Bitsquare announced ETHC trading right after the fork. Other trading venues will follow since there is a strong business case. We are in touch with several other exchanges to add ETHC trading to their platforms. If your exchange is interested in ETHC trading, please contact us."

Is it safe to mine to bittrex eth adress?As there is no ETH Classic Wallet available anywhere or am I wrong?

From OP

"Both Poloniex a Bitfinex announced that they will assign their users both ETH and ETHC after the fork. This is a step in the right direction, now it's up to these major exchanges to enable ETH/ETHC trading that will no doubt be demanded by users. Decentralized exchange Bitsquare announced ETHC trading right after the fork. Other trading venues will follow since there is a strong business case. We are in touch with several other exchanges to add ETHC trading to their platforms. If your exchange is interested in ETHC trading, please contact us."

Is it safe to mine to bittrex eth adress?As there is no ETH Classic Wallet available anywhere or am I wrong?

From OP

"Both Poloniex a Bitfinex announced that they will assign their users both ETH and ETHC after the fork. This is a step in the right direction, now it's up to these major exchanges to enable ETH/ETHC trading that will no doubt be demanded by users. Decentralized exchange Bitsquare announced ETHC trading right after the fork. Other trading venues will follow since there is a strong business case. We are in touch with several other exchanges to add ETHC trading to their platforms. If your exchange is interested in ETHC trading, please contact us."

Maybe Polo has an ETHC address you can mine to?

edit: I logged Polo and I don't have an ETHC address yet.

I mined to my ether wallet that I created from myetherwallet.com a long time ago. My balance is still held in "pending payout". Not sure why. Either I'm waiting for a random payout time or specific amount of time to pass, or they can't send to that wallet. Either way, I trust I will be able to withdraw my coins from the pool. At worst, I wasted 100k sats to support the pool which is also fine.

I'd guess that 99% of ETH owners were using EWallets. This is extremely dangerous, since it gives those EWallets massive control over the network. This is exactly the sort of centralization risk that Bitcoin experts are constantly warning about in relation to the max block size. It is absolutely essential that the economy be backed by many independent full nodes so that miners + a small handful of "major players" can't completely change the currency.

I believe 99% of ethf users were in it for the pump and dump. None had an intent to run nodes, create an economy, build contracts, nothing.

Vitalik has set a precedent. If there's ever child porn, drugs, gambling, etc. The fbi can come straight to his house and he has 0 deniability. He'll be in jail for contempt.